


The Empire Needs Children

by PermianExtinction



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Armitage's Mom is Dark Side, Copious Amounts of Rain and Fish, Flawed Parental Figures, Force-Sensitive Hux, Gen, Tense Family Relations, Young Hux, bittersweet fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2018-08-10 11:24:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7843036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PermianExtinction/pseuds/PermianExtinction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he knew of the grand galactic conflict that had spanned generations, he knew of the ships in the sky.  Before he had a destiny, he had simple curiosity. Before he lived aboard exiled Star Destroyers, he lived in a little house by the sea on Arkanis. Before he had a father, he had a mother.</p><p>Before he was General Armitage Hux, he was Tag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Man

**Author's Note:**

> I've already written a story about a childhood Hux might've had if his parents were happily married. But just one day after that fic was posted, someone screencapped a page from Aftermath: Life Debt that changed everything. It was Armitaggedon. 
> 
> Now, having read both Aftermath books and The Secret Academy (where Hux's father first appears), I've come back with a new vision, based on the idea that tiny Armitage Hux might have lived with his mother for the first four and a half years of his life. Also, his mother is no ordinary kitchen woman in this. Because I'm always trash for badass moms. 
> 
> Enjoy and please comment if you liked it!

With surgical precision, bounty hunter Mercurial Swift sliced his ship through the subtle opening provided for him by the Imperial fleet, dodging and weaving in his descent towards the surface of Arkanis. If not for the direct orders Swift carried from Grand Admiral Rae Sloane – orders to assist the bounty hunter with all possible resources – he might never have made it through the wall of New Republic ships besieging the planet.

Despite the worse odds, Swift still might have preferred to make the opening himself. To him, the thrill of being a bounty hunter was working alone, never relying on the brute force of his employers to assist in getting the job done. Bounty hunters were hired for situations where brute force was undesirable. When Swift hailed the admiral in command of the Arkanis Defense Fleet, he’d felt like some kind of operative or internal agent as he waved about his clearance codes. It rankled him.

But nothing about this mission was standard bounty hunting. Sloane had made things clear as crystal: Swift was to grant safe passage off the planet for one Brendol Hux, Academy Commandant, and – it was emphasized – his son. Swift didn’t specialize in _rescues_ ; he specialized in killing, or, at the very least, subduing through violent means. Most of Admiral Sloane’s missions for him were quiet assassinations of key Imperial figures. Swift didn’t care much for politics, but he recalled what Sloane had told him of his targets on one occasion. _They are the excess metal on a dull blade, and you are the grindstone._ It stood out in his mind because it hadn’t sounded like her words. Florid yet brutalistic metaphors weren’t her style.

So, the Empire intended to sharpen itself. But was this just a final dogged effort to cling to power, or was a new era approaching?

At least there was a bit of excitement to be had. Swift twisted the flight control stick in his hands, narrowly avoiding a volley of lasers which sprayed out from the underbelly of a nearby ship.

Hazy as the galaxy’s future might be, as hazy as the cloudbank his ship angled towards as it embraced the planet’s gravity like a meteor, Mercurial Swift knew better than to side against Rae Sloane – and whomever stood unseen behind her, holding her leash. If that meant playing the ferrycraft for blustering commandants and knobby-kneed children, so be it.

 

The captain of the New Republic frigate _Abalone_ bared her teeth, but did not utter the string of curses that came rising up her throat like half-digested cud. Back in the Rebellion days, it was more acceptable to swear like a pirate when things went wrong, but in the service of a newly established government, one had to carry oneself with a bit more dignity.

Through the viewport, the ship that had darted past their hurried barrage quicker than a skeetfly dodging a swatter could be seen skirting behind one of the Imperial Star Destroyers.

“Does that vessel match any in our records?” the captain demanded.

A lieutenant sitting at his station shook his head. “It went by too quickly to be properly scanned, ma’am.”

But considering the Empire sacrificed a squadron of TIE fighters to distract them from that ship’s approach… “It was too small to be bringing supplies to the surface. But it’s just the right size to pick up a few passengers.” The captain marched over to the broad communications desk. “Alert the rest of the fleet. We cannot let that ship make it out of the system.”

She braced herself on the desk for a moment. When was the last time she had slept for more than half an hour? The Empire had put up a fearsome fight, unwilling to let their officers’ academy fall into enemy hands. But slowly, surely, their defenses were crumbling. Vigilance would continue to pay off; victory – and rest – might be close at hand.

The captain steeled her spine. “Whoever’s trying to escape Arkanis,” she said, “is about to be sorely disappointed.”

 

Far below, on the surface of the planet, stood the stern stone academy, shrouded in mist. A few klicks away, following the coast, lay the muggy fishing town of Scaparus, and a little ways beyond that, in a mostly uninhabited part of the landscape, there was Home.

Home was a looming cliff, a sheer face of stone which the gray sea dashed itself against, frothing as a maddened animal might. The incessant beating of the waves had scored out tall, thin caves along the base of the cliff, vertical crevasses harboring stiller waters within which the vicious but ever-patient vithca were said to breed. Above and around the cliff, scavenger birds swooped and screamed, and every so often one of them knifed down towards the water to pluck at the remains of an unlucky fish which had been caught in a swell and battered to a paste on the rocks.

At the top of the cliff there was an outcrop jutting over the edge like a horn and on this outcrop, rigidly transfixed by what he saw in the skies, was the boy who called this place Home. His name was Tag.

Tag, aged four and three-quarters in the standard galactic system, was just old enough for his tight frown to appear solemn instead of comically pouting, but not so old that it seemed severe. Even when smiling he had an air of solemnity; this was because he had prematurely lost the first of his baby teeth and was self-conscious of the gap, so he kept his mouth closed and his lips pursed thin. He was slight, with twig-like bones and skin that matched the off-white hue of nerf milk. His cheeks and palms were still soft, but the rest of him had consumed his baby fat in a recent spurt of growth. As a result, a few inches of bony ankle showed now that his woolen trousers were a half-size too small. His eyes were pale, mostly blue but sometimes tinting green, and his hair was a bright reddish ginger.

He stared upwards because there were colors flashing in spurts between the clouds, usually red and green slivers but sometimes a larger glow of orange which lasted for a long time, burning harshly and forming a slow-moving streak across the sky. Normally the cloud cover on Arkanis was too dense to see through, but this afternoon was different, and because it was different, Tag could watch the battle unfold. It had been going on for the better part of a few months, and Tag had come to memorize the positions of the largest ships, the trowel-shaped gray Star Destroyers, so he could always look at the patch of sky where they _would_ be on more overcast days, whether he was here or in town or elsewhere. The best time to watch them was at night, but he needed all the sleep of a growing boy, and could not stay up late as often as he might have liked.

Before the siege, Tag would watch the birds, or peer over the cliff edge in the hopes of spotting a few tentacled shadows slipping out of the caves. Or, when inland, he would stare at the wooly nerf herds as they grazed, or even the cohorts of cadets who visited town, with their neat short hair and identical clothes. Tag liked to watch creatures, sentient or otherwise, moving together in groups. With patient observation, it was possible to tell who was leading, and who was following, and little stories would unfold if you understood such things. Stories of simple needs and desires: two birds fighting over a scrap of fish, a group of big kids trying to pick a sweetshop to visit, a mother nerf nudging her calf back towards the herd when it strayed. When there was conflict, Tag rarely sided with one creature over another (because of this, he had never picked up an interest in spectating sports). Instead, he imagined and rooted for an outcome where everything settled into a stable system. Tag liked patterns, formulas and cycles that could go on and on forever. He didn’t have the breadth of knowledge to describe any of this, but it was something he felt deeply, at his core.

And then the ships had gathered and stayed, high up in the sky. It was not just conflict, it was War, and that was a big thing. Tag knew from his history lessons that when war happened, things changed. There were two sides, one Good and one Bad (or sometimes both were Bad, but they were never both Good), and they fought until one of the sides won and took charge.

So Tag learned new ways of thinking about what he was seeing. Balance was still the desired outcome, but balance would come when all the ships that weren’t Ours had been destroyed or chased away. Otherwise, the NEW REPUBLIC – which was a very grand and frightening term – would win and take over and be in charge.

It was a slow transition for Tag. It took conscious effort to feel good when a New Republic ship turned into orange fire, or to feel bad when the same happened to an Empire ship. But he did practice feeling this way, with great diligence.

For a time, it seemed that luck determined whose ships were lost and when. But the errant thought had crossed Tag’s mind, at times when he was successfully mustering up feelings of patriotism, that maybe when One of Ours was lost, there was something that should have been done _differently_.

In learning how to take sides, he was also learning how to worry.

Just as the wind started to pick up, Tag heard someone approaching, a sound which came as the clacking of pebbles grinding and shifting underfoot.

“There’s rain on the way.” It was Mother, of course. She smelled briny, because she’d been gutting glintings – savory finger-sized fish that traveled in schools close to the surface and sparkled when you shone a beam down at them. She knelt and put a companionable hand on the top of Tag’s head, ruffling his hair. The two of them had hair that matched in color, though hers was crinkled and wavy and his lay flat and straight. “Do you want to stay out until it comes?”

Tag turned around and met his mother’s gaze directly, as if chastising her for being concerned with trifling things like the weather. “We lost another One of Ours,” he said gravely, imitating the way grown-ups said it. He’d seen it burn, and he knew it was Imperial because of the shape.

“I bet that made a whopping fireball,” his mother said, nudging him conspiratorially. Unlike the other adults, who grew cagey and uneasy and tried to change the subject when Tag brought up the war – even when they freely spoke of it amongst each other – Mother listened and responded. But Tag found that his mother was sometimes a little too unconcerned for his liking.

He admitted it had, indeed, been a whopping fireball, with a quick nod. But he turned away, scowling at the ground until his mother sighed and gripped his shoulders, rotating him to face her. “What is it?” she asked.

“What if we lose?” the boy mumbled. “They’ll take over…”

Mother held him firmly. “Then we wait. We wait and we watch for weaknesses, the way the vithca do. You’re a patient boy, Tag. It won’t be so bad. No one will ever hurt you, because I won’t let them. And one day, when you’re older, you can do something about it.”

When she looked into his eyes and spoke like that, her voice a soft, gentle purr, Tag always felt that he understood such big ideas better than if another grown-up had said it. Mother could tell you things directly, and the words were just embellishment. So the little boy nodded again.

Then Mother grinned wickedly and poked his navel. “And until then, we sell them rotten fish to give them a bellyache.”

“No! That’s silly!” Tag complained, scrunching his nose with annoyance as his mother laughed.

“Nonsense. Poison’s a marvelous strategy. Do you want to go inside?”

Though the break in the clouds was still visible, it was beginning to shrink, and, from far away, there came a low grumble of thunder. Tag took his mother’s hand, a nonverbal signal that he wanted to go indoors with her. The woman stood, pausing to examine the ships in the sky. There was faint disdain playing at the corners of her lips. Then she turned her back to the sight and guided her son away from the cliff.

A few hundred meters back from the edge there was the house. It was a squat stone dwelling with two stories, though the upstairs was more of an appendix to the structure, no bigger than a single room. Moss clung to the exterior of the walls; in some spots it was growing as wild vegetation did but in others it was sectioned off into cultivated patches.

“Make aka!” Tag crowed, pointing at one of these patches, a set of slanted window boxes with furry green and rust-red plots of moss. “Please, Mother?”

“Will you help with the glintings if I do?”

The boy nodded eagerly, finding this an agreeable contract, and his mother sifted thoughtfully through the reddish moss before peeling away a fresh square.

As the woman washed the moss and prepared to stew it in a small tin pot, she watched Tag clamber up onto a chair. Two piles of silvery fish sat on the table, and between them the smaller heap of the waste. Already quite familiar with the gutting claw, Tag set to work using the tool to scrape the inedible parts of the fish away. The claw did most of the work, but it needed someone to pull the fish out and put new ones in. Tag made very neat piles, usually laying the gutted fish side by side like the logs of a wooden cabin, and he counted them under his breath.

“Twelve. Thirteen. I bet I can do fifty before the aka’s ready. Fourteen.”

“Don’t rush and prick your finger. We can’t have blood on the fish.”

“I won’t. Fifteen. Sixteen.”

“Here comes the rain,” said Mother, as water drops began to splatter against the window.

 

Tag did not have a strong memory of why he called the sweet moss tea that they had on rainy afternoons “aka”. To him, it was just the pet name they used, and it made as much sense to call it that as with any word given to any object. But his mother did remember, because it had been two years ago, and it had been the most dreadful experience of self-doubt she had ever known.

Her son had come down with a mild cough that escalated over several days into real sickness. The week that followed was worse than a nightmare: Tag was bedridden, unable to eat, racked with unceasing coughing fits that were at first loud and ragged, but became hoarser and feebler until he barely made noise, just spasmed in his cot like a fish on land. His body rejected the weak medicines which were available at the Scaparus clinic. He could only whisper “hurts, hurts” until he stopped speaking entirely.

And it had all culminated in Mother standing on the mossy bluff overlooking the Imperial Officers’ Academy, her heart thumping wildly as she clasped her child to her breast, torn between fears pulling her forward and fears pulling her away. Once, she thought she had mastered fear – had found it within her, grappled it into submission, and kept it as tame and useful pet – but in the end she had been playing a long game of illusions. Fear could not be broken.

There was no denying that what pulled her away was a selfish fear, the threat of failure. And what drew her to this point was the fear of losing her son. But those terrors had feet pointing in both directions. Would giving the boy over to the Academy hospital be the way she lost him for good? Would keeping him in this state be the true failure that she could never rise above?

On that day, the wind had been throwing her hair about, obscuring her vision. Tiny, chilly flecks of rainwater were just beginning to come down, and she had to blink them away. The air smelled strangely sweet.

And then the child in her arms – frail, fading Tag, who had been close to hacking up his lungs on the speeder ride there – stirred and turned his head towards the building complex below. Then he extended a hesitant finger towards it and said distinctly, “The man.” In fact he said it twice; once sleepily, and then again with more confidence.

Those words froze Mother in place. She searched frantically for any presence which the boy could have been indicating, but there was no one within view. “What man?” she whispered. “What are you talking about, lovey? Where is the man?”

Tag’s finger steadily pointed at the Academy. “The man lives there.”

Mother took a step away from the bluff, then another. And then she was climbing into her covered speeder, tucking her child into the safety basket beside her and fleeing back over the scrub-covered hills, spooking a herd of lumbering diplopods who were nearly too slow to get out of the way.

Even shaken to the point of questioning her firmest principles, Tag’s mother did not doubt what the toddler meant, however improbable. He had known. He had said, _the man_ because he did not possess the understanding or context to use the right words. He did not know to say, _Father._

Tag was precocious; that his mother knew well. And it was possible that within the bounds of that precociousness was a memory that stretched back to his infancy, which was the only time he had ever spent at the Imperial Academy. There were stories of little children who could pull up details of their own births if they suffered a trauma great enough. The coughing sickness might have been a suitable trigger. But such stories – how Mother knew such stories well – were usually about children under _suspicion_. Children believed to possess the kind of sensitivity that little Tag definitely lacked. They assumed he lacked it. There were biological markers; the boy had been tested over and over.

But maybe everything they had thought they understood about it was wrong.

Once, the hope that her child was gifted would have spurred her onwards, back towards the light of civilization and purpose. But what if those hopes were dashed again? And what if Tag was only a little bit sensitive, only fit to be used in studies? The very idea repulsed her.

And then there was, of course, _the man_. The father.

On the way back home, Tag’s coughing started up again. It struck Mother that the boy’s symptoms had vanished while she had stood with him in her arms on that overlook. He had spoken clearly for the first time in days.

They made a stop in Scaparus. Vendors still sat under their awnings in the market street, unconcerned by a little rain – or a lot of rain. They eyed the woman with her child guardedly.

Instead of heading to the clinic, which catered to the Imperials lingering about the region while guarding, serving, or leeching off of the Academy’s presence, Tag’s mother stepped under the canvas covering a one-eyed crone’s wares: herbs, mushrooms, jars of pickled waterweeds, and squares of damp moss.

“The vithca woman,” the old merchant said. She had a gravely, yet lilting accent, the cadence of local speech.

“Is that what they call me?”

“You live among ‘em. You hunt among ‘em. Rumor has it they do as you tell ‘em.” The merchant pointed at Mother’s face and then, with a humorless grin, traced a wrinkled finger over her own forehead and her empty eye socket, down her cheek, where a line of sucker marks pitted the skin. “The Imps buy your hauls and your story. But real Arkanisians know what kinds of scars the vithca leave. And those beasts have ne’er touched you.”

Mother gripped Tag tighter, and met the crone’s gaze. “My son is sick with a cough,” she said evenly. “He’s just an ordinary little boy.” She pointed at a swatch of rust-red moss blooming with tiny white flowers. She remembered it covering the bluff, running down the sides towards the watchtowers and the walls. A hunch. A guess. “Will this help?”

“Ask your offworlder doctors,” said the crone, jerking her chin towards the clinic.

“No,” Mother said. “Tell me. Tell me now.”

For a moment the sound of the rain on the cobbled street seemed to be muffled. The crone’s good eye widened slightly, and then her jaw slackened. Her tone was distant. “… makes a sweet tea when boiled. Good for the throat. The scent from the flowers can ease a bad cough. Grows around the Academy… they don’t like us pickin’ it.”

“Very good,” Mother murmured, setting a credit bar in the woman’s lap. She took the pot of moss and showed it to Tag, who stared at it curiously.

“Grows ‘round…” A little flicker of recognition appeared in the boy’s blue eyes. “The Aca—” But he was cut off by a coughing fit. “Aca—”

That glimmer of understanding worried Mother once again, but she tried to make light of it as she left the dazed merchant in her stall and hurried back to the speeder. “The Aka?” she teased.

Tag coughed and whimpered with dismay and tried to speak again as he was buckled into his basket. “The.” Cough. “Ac.” Cough. He seemed determined to say the word.

“Aca.”

“Demy!” Tag burst out angrily. “The ‘cademy. The big place.”

The delicate fragrance of the flowers was beginning to fill the enclosed cockpit of the speeder. Mother inhaled slowly. It _did_ smell like the Academy, the perimeter of it at least, during certain seasons.

Tag did not recover immediately. He struggled to swallow the tea even if he liked the flavor. He could only eat little bits of food at a time. But he did not lose his voice again, and the coughing seemed to become more irritating than truly painful. And in time, he became well again – not hale and strong, because he never had been, but no longer sick. He got it into his head to call the moss tea “aka”, and Mother played along, because it helped distract the boy.

 

“Do I have a father?” It came later than she expected. Just a little after the ships appeared overhead.

Her response sounded unruffled, at least. “What’s got you worrying about that?”

Tag was strapped to her back while Mother combed the shore a klick or so from Home for glasswort and small edible crustaceans. Her son was a little old to be carried about, but he insisted, and he wasn’t quite tall enough to manage in the deeper pools. When Mother found something to put in the baskets at her hips, she would pass it back to Tag first, as if for inspection. He liked that.

Mother reflected sometimes on how so many of their days involved gathering food, to sell or to eat for themselves. It wasn’t too arduous. This length of shoreline, for instance, was unusually rich and wild, untouched by any of the locals. They never went hungry. But to hunt, to gather, with no greater purpose in mind; it was a beast’s life. And yet it was often satisfying in its simplicity.

“Well,” Tag said, contemplatively chewing on a scrap of seaweed and relishing the salty taste, “Humans have all got two parents. A mother and a father. ‘cept clones.” Tag knew about the Clone Wars. He had a little tin of soldiers who could fit into an assault lander or form up into a platoon. But until the ships in the sky had appeared, he hadn’t played with them like that. He’d preferred to build houses for them out of bark and sticks, or take them on fishing trips for good luck. “Am I a clone?”

“I can barely handle one of you. What would I do with thousands?”

“Fight the New Republic.”

Finding nothing to say in response to this, Mother bent down and dug her fingers into the sand, dragging out a large blue-bodied crabbin. Normally she would cut its head off immediately and wait for its legs to stop twitching before passing it to Tag. But she watched its limbs flail for a moment. Its wriggling was futile, but at the same time, there was no reason for it _not_ to struggle, on the chance it might break free.

“Do you want to have crabbin tonight?” Mother asked.

The crabbin wheeled its legs. Tag debated. “No. Buttered greens, please.”

Mother set the creature down. In its uncomplicated mind, it probably believed it had managed to best its attacker. It would never understand that it had been spared by the whim of a child’s appetite.

She worked in silence for a little while longer, but it turned out Tag had not been distracted. He simply went back to internal ruminations. Then, when he had collected his thoughts, he spoke up once more. “Reba said she knows who my father is.”

“Reba? Who is she?”

“A big kid. From the Academy.”

A cadet. So Tag had managed to befriend one of them. He had always found them fascinating to watch when in town. And it was hard for him to make friends with the local children, when he talked and acted like a boy twice his age. “What did she tell you?”

“She said I’m the Commandant’s son.” He pronounced the word slowly and precisely. It was a big word for him, but Tag was frightfully good with big words. He murmured them over and over to himself until he got them right. And it was a word he would have heard quite often in town, enough that he had his own sense of what it meant, without ever having it defined for him.

The waves stopped lapping at the rocks. The surface of the water became glassy and calm.

Mother spoke quietly. “Why would she know anything about that?”

“I… she just said. I don’t know!” Squirming a little in the pack, Tag went on the defensive. “She didn’t really say I was. Only, I could be. Maybe.”

“Does it matter?” Mother had a tidewater mussel gripped in one hand. In the stillness, the sound of its shell cracking was very distinct. Then came a faint wet squelch as its slippery insides began to ooze out.

Tag was deeply confused. Didn’t it matter? Precocious or not, at four and a half he still relied on adults to explain what was important and what wasn’t. “I thought…”

“Who, might I ask, takes care of you? Who feeds you each and every day?” All traces of playfulness had left Mother’s voice. It had become strangely sibilant, yet it also reminded Tag of the HoloNet broadcasts from town. Sometimes he imitated the way the announcer spoke, thinking it comical. But when Mother spoke that way, it was nothing to laugh at. “Who keeps you safe – is it the Commandant?”

Tag did not respond.

“I asked you a question,” Mother said sharply.

Suddenly Tag was wriggling and before his mother could stop him, he had unfastened the straps that bound the basket he was nestled in to her back. It splashed into the shallow water and then Tag crawled out, forehead bunched with mulish anger. His knee stung; it had struck a rock when he fell, but he didn’t want to admit regretting his actions so quickly.

Mother spun around and grabbed his wrist, pulling him to his feet. “What were you thinking? Did you hurt yourself? Taggie, look at me.”

“I just wanted to get down,” the boy mumbled, his eyes tightening as he held back tears. “I just wanted…” Then he tried to jerk his arm away. “Let me go!”

She scowled and held on tighter. “Tag, behave yourself. You’re being unreasonable.”

He quieted for a moment, then his temper flared and he lashed out at one of the two wicker baskets on his mother’s hips, shoving hard enough for it to unclip and fall into the water. Its contents – mostly leafy greens – spilled out.

Snarling a few words in a rough language Tag did not understand, Mother dropped his wrist and tried to scoop as much as she could back into the basket. The boy took a few steps back, seeking freedom but frightened of his own misbehavior. “I didn’t mean—” he began plaintively.

“ _Tag, stop right there!_ ”

It was not anger this time. Instead, something worse had infused her words – shrill urgency. Mother’s hand was outstretched and quivering as if from effort.

And there was a faint sloshing of water behind him. Something was moving about. The boy stood stock still, afraid to turn around.

“You should know better,” Mother hissed. “But you’re young. Impatient.”

“I’m… I’m s-sorry—” Tag stuttered.

“Hush. Hush and stay put. I’m not talking to you.”

The boy swallowed. His stomach seemed to have twisted into a fat knot.

Mother slowly straightened up and took a deep breath. The corners of her lips curved upwards, but somehow one could not call it a smile. In a peculiar sing-song tone, like she was telling a bedtime story, she said, “If you try anything other than slowly backing away, I shall cut off every last one of your limbs and kick your helpless body around the plain like a big. Rubber. Ball.”

Tag heard bubbling in the water. He held his arms at his sides and remained absolutely motionless.

Finally, Mother’s hand relaxed, and then she beckoned to Tag. She sounded like herself again, when she spoke. “Come here, darling. It’s all right. There’s no need to fret.”

He stumbled forwards, shaking with relief, and let his mother scoop him up into her arms. She lifted him up out of the water, kissed his cheeks and forehead, and then settled him on her hip where the basket had been.

Tag nestled himself against her, hiding his face against her neck. “Are you cross with me, Mother?”

“Oh, Tag. No, of course not. I’d rather you behave, but…” She set the basket on the rocks and went back to gathering up the scattered glasswort. “I suppose I can’t blame you.”

Eventually, Tag plucked up the courage to tilt his head and glance out at the waves, at the spot where he had been standing. But all he saw was a mat of dark green seaweed slowly drifting away from the shore.

 

“Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four.”

Mother slowly lifted the pot full of dark burgundy liquid. It had been stewing for at least a minute longer than necessary.

Tag’s counting sped up. “For’five. For’six. For’seven.”

Mother swished the tea idly and held the pot next a pair of light duraplast mugs, one with a lid and a straw and the other without, watching the boy work.

“For’eight. For’nine. Fifty—I did fifty! I _said_ I could!”

“Incredible work. And you’re so good at counting, too. Now, wash your hands.”

As Tag got up on a stepstool to rinse his fish-stained hands off in the sink, Mother poured the tea out through the strainer into the mugs, filling one and then the other. She passed him Tag the first when she deemed his hands clean and headed to the window seat with the second, urging her son to follow. He found the mug to be a little heavy, and his wrists wobbled a little, but the lid was secure and nothing spilled.

“Don’t drink it right away,” Mother reminded him. “Let it cool.”

They sat together on the wool-stuffed cushions, listening to the chatter of the rain as it soaked the gravel around the house. They talked quietly together; Tag was still puffed up about his accomplishment with the glintings, so their conversation turned to that, and it became about math. He had just begun to realize the world of strange ideas that numbers opened up to him. It was a constant challenge, and he lived for challenge.

At first they discussed mundanities, but slowly the topics grew more theoretical. How many credits did they sell each fish for? Two fish were one credit, Mother said. Tag was unsatisfied. He didn’t want to know how much two fish were, he wanted to know how much one was. Half, said Mother, half a credit. Bemused, Tag pointed out that ‘half’ wasn’t a number, and Mother said it was an amount less than one and more than zero. Exactly two halves make one. And then the question of how many credits the fifty fish would sell for, and Mother said, half of fifty, which was twenty-five. The price of one was half of the number one, and the price of fifty was half of the number fifty. Tag struggled and struggled and then in a burst of comprehension he saw it, a miraculous abstraction that suddenly lay in his lap, a tool like the gutting claw, something he could use, in this case, to quantify the world.

“How many other numbers are between one and zero?” he finally asked.

“Oh. That’s a big question. Are you sure you want to know?”

Tag hesitated. Once, he would have immediately assented, but he was beginning to learn that there were some questions too big to be asked. Then he grew serious and nodded.

“There’s no end to them,” Mother said. “Between zero and one there is forever and ever and ever.”

This took a long time to ruminate on. “But,” said Tag. He thought. He slurped his tea. He thought harder. “But it can’t be.” His features twisted with uncertainty. “How can it fit?”

“I don’t know, but it does. It must be magic.”

Gradually, the afternoon passed into evening. Mother suggested Tag fetch his sleepwear and a holobook for them to read together while she finished up with the fish. He yawned and nodded and scampered off to the other side of the house.

Their bedroom – the only room in the tiny second story – was more like a loft, with a low ceiling and a nest of blankets where the two of them slept covering part of the floor. It felt perfectly cozy for a boy Tag’s size. He kept miscellaneous belongings in a wooden chest in one corner, and left an area open on the floor for playing with them.

As he opened the chest, a pale glow swept over him, a bright beam that came in through the window for just a moment and then moved away as fast as it had come.

It was not lightning. Tag pressed his nose against the window, amazed, and saw the circle of light tracing over the ground, illuminating the rain in a tall column above it. He followed the column up to the sky and saw a blocky shape, a square shadow, moving through the clouds.

Fear, at first, held him temporarily paralyzed, until he felt a pulse of… what was it? He could not place the emotion. But because of it, he scrambled back downstairs, forgetting the book and the nightclothes, and stood on his tiptoes to unlock the back door.

Outside, he could see the circle of light had settled a little ways away from the house, and the shadow, the _ship_ , was descending, at first higher than the cliff behind it, then as high up as the house’s second story, and then it was putting out feet from the bottom and touching the ground.

Part of the ship’s underside cracked away and lowered, becoming a ramp. Tag had seen ships landing before, having visited the spaceport, but he never thought that they could come here, to Home. They never had done so before.

He took a step out into the rain, and then another.

Two figures also stepped forward and split the light from within the ship.

At first, the figures stood together, but one, the broader of the two, strode forward purposefully while the other loped behind. But both sets of footsteps on the metal ramp were heavy, impactful, important.

Tag stared at the man who had taken the lead. He was tall, and wide, and dressed in a form of the crisp gray uniform all the people labeled as _Imperial_ wore. Unlike most of them, he had the scratchy beginnings of a beard, and a long woolen coat that the rain slid off of, which reminded Tag more of local Arkanisian men than offworlders.

His expression was stiff, almost pained; when he saw Tag standing there it rearranged into something else, but something that was equally complicated. Tag stared back with widening eyes.

The other man spoke first, though.

“Is that him?”

The Imperial slowly inclined his chin. “Yes.”

“So what do we do? Snatch him? Where’s the mistress? Will she make a fuss if we let him say goodbye—?”

“You talk too much,” the Imperial interrupted coldly. His voice did not sound as sharp and clear as Mother’s could, but it had its own flinty edge of command.

The other man looked away disdainfully, but fell silent.

Tag shivered when the Imperial’s gaze turned towards him once more, but he stood his ground. He didn’t know if he could run if he wanted; his feet seemed rooted in place. There was only one person who this man could be.

“Hello, Armitage,” the Commandant said.


	2. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been over a year... here are two rude men bickering

Even though the job wasn’t the sort where stealth was essential, Mercurial Swift snuck up to and perched on the sill of Brendol Hux’s office window. Just for fun, he ran scenarios in his head while doing this where this _was_ a neutralization, though when the Commandant appeared, Swift had to amend some of his ideas. The man was absolutely too large to be stunned and slung over a shoulder. The holo-ID Swift had been given must have been a bit outdated, because, while appearing stocky, the little projection of Hux hadn’t been straining his uniform. The man had clearly put on weight – not the first officer Swift had met who had let their appearance go as the decline of the Empire became truly apparent.

He hadn’t put on a sense of humor, though. As soon as Hux spotted the bounty hunter, a blaster appeared in his right hand. Swift had to admit it was a quick draw for someone who spent his days teaching kids how to take orders and look smart in little caps and shiny boots. Perhaps the siege had brought out a touch of paranoia. 

“Relax, Commandant,” Swift drawled. He idly spun his signature pair of batons in his hands. “I’m the one they sent to help you. If this had been an assassination, you wouldn’t have seen me at all.” 

Seemingly more annoyed than threatened, Hux snapped, “Get down from there at once.” 

The man _did_ sound like an instructor there, one speaking to a particularly stupid and unruly child. Swift almost expected to hear, _And stop fidgeting! Stand up straight!_ He played his part for the time being, rolling his eyes like a chastised delinquent as he slid down from the sill, slotting the batons back into place at his hips so he could raise his hands over his head. “This is my first rescue operation. Forgive me for falling back on old habits.”

“And who has decided that I require rescuing?”

It was an understandable question, given how the Empire had splintered. Had other factions already contacted Hux? Had they _threatened_ him? “If you check the clearance codes I’ve brought along, you’ll see I’m currently under the employ of Grand Admiral Sloane.” With his chin, he indicated a tiny pouch just to the side of his armpit.

Hux kept his weapon trained on Swift as he approached, then sharply retrieved the datachip from the pouch. It activated a small holodisplay that at first showed nothing but text, then flickered to become a blue figurine-sized specter of the Grand Admiral herself.

“ _Commandant Hux_ ,” the hologram said in a firm, smooth voice, the sort which drew attention without having to be overly cross or overly loud. “ _I trust this recording, along with my agent, has reached you in time._ ” 

Swift scowled. “ _Agent_. Not really the word I’d use—” 

He saw Hux’s blaster barrel flick upwards irritably, and held his tongue.

“ _Arkanis stands poised to fall into enemy hands,_ ” Sloane’s hologram continued. “ _And rest assured, the New Republic will not treat you kindly. But your Empire is in need of your services, now more than ever._ ”

It seemed nothing more than a simple platitude. _Your Empire needs you_ – the stuff of propaganda posters, reiterated until even the cynics subconsciously accepted it. And Sloane outranked Hux, so she shouldn’t have to convince him of anything, just give orders. Nonspecific ones, of course, in case the New Republic should capture them and the datachip. But Swift caught a glint in the Commandant’s eyes that suggested these words did mean something specific to him. 

“ _You have been reassigned. Believe me when I say it is to a position of great standing. The bounty hunter calling himself Mercurial Swift will escort you and your son offworld; I suggest you do not delay. Until we meet in person, Commandant._ ”

With that, her terse, direct message was over. 

The glimmer of hope in Hux’s eyes shifted to bitter uncertainty. He lowered the blaster and set it on his desk, with the datachip beside it. “He wants my son,” the man muttered. 

Swift squinted. He’d caught that. Feigning insipidity, hoping to coax answers out of Hux, he said, “Er… _She_ , you mean.”

Hux did not elaborate. “Do they pay you to interrupt?” he snapped.

If only they did, Swift thought. If only he’d been given specific instructions to stuff a gag in Hux’s mouth and walk him out at gunpoint. Come to think of it, Sloane hadn’t specified that he be polite to the man. Just get him off the planet. 

But Swift told himself he could endure a big ego. He’d met quite a few in his fellow bounty hunters, but he didn’t like working with them, or even thinking of them as fellows. But before he’d been a bounty hunter, he’d been an actor, and even in a small troupe there would always be one or two prima donnas. He wasn’t sure yet if he’d describe Hux as one, but the man was clearly in a world of his own as he paced the room, his expression growing heavier and stormier and fuller of unease.

“No,” the Commandant was saying, a hand rubbing over his jaw and tugging at the hairs growing there, as if he was not accustomed to their presence. “No, no, not Armitage… He’s not… He hasn’t been trained. I haven’t even seen… not in _years_. I can’t expect them to have confidence my methods if that boy is all I have to…”

Swift let this run on for a bit, and then cleared his throat. “I have clear instructions. You and the boy. Off the planet. Brought to the fleet. That’s it.” He supposed the unspoken _deal with it_ was pretty plain in his tone. 

Hux certainly heard it; his scowl grew more pronounced. He stalked past Swift and stared out of the window that the man had arrived through. Eyes roving over the academy buildings, he seemed to be seeking something, but whether it was a tangible thing or simply an idea or revelation, he did not find it.

But his gaze was then called up to the sky, and his expression changed. Swift had a suspicion that it was because of the orange fireball that had just become visible through a break in the clouds. 

The suspicion was confirmed; Hux turned back to his desk and booted up his console, taking great pains not to appear distressed when it was clear from his abruptly guarded demeanor that something was indeed wrong. A display of the battle raging in the skies appeared over the top of the desk, and one of the three Star Destroyers was flashing urgently.

“The _Desolator_ ,” Hux said flatly. “We’ve lost it.” 

_You’ve lost it_ , Swift thought. _Not we._ “Not a good sign, is it?” he said aloud.

It was a sign that the rest of the Imperial defense forces would be soon to follow. Perhaps they would hold position until they too, became a flare of light and smoke. Far more likely, though, would be their surrender. And whichever route to defeat they chose, the New Republic would be able to capture the planet, and the Academy. 

“Fetch me my coat,” Hux said, palms still pressed against the rim of the console as he leaned forward, eyes locked onto the screen.

Swift did no such thing. He crossed his arms over his chest.

After his pale eyes flicked over the display a few more times, the Commandant seemed to return to the present moment. Without even glancing at the man standing by the window, Hux straightened and crossed over to the wall, palming open a closet space that was startlingly bare, save for the long woolen coat Hux pulled from its hanger, and a fat storage trunk, the base of which Hux struck sharply with the toe of his boot. Humming a low monotone, the trunk powered on and levitated a little ways off the ground.

“So, you’ve had your own plans for escape,” Swift eventually said, nodding towards the floating trunk. It was the only sensible explanation for why all of Hux’s belongings were gathered in one place. “I’m guessing a few of them went sour, or you wouldn’t still be here.” 

No confirmation or denial of this from Hux, as he donned his coat and returned to the console. He appeared agitated, but no more than he had been before. “Don’t just stand there, man,” he eventually barked. The lights on the console flickered off one by one until it seemed to have regressed into nothing more than a metal table in the center of the room. “Pick up the luggage. Do _something_ useful.”

Swift thought for a few moments. “No,” he said.

This time Hux did look up, and he fixed Swift with a disapproving scowl before returning to what he was doing, which appeared to be wiping the console databank. 

Swift caught a tiny motion that was mostly hidden, but suggested by the twitch in Hux’s left wrist. As if he was tugging on something small that had been attached to the underside of the table. A datastick, perhaps.

Then Hux went to fetch his trunk, yanking it out of the closet by the handle and hauling it towards the door. Swift found it amusing how there seemed to be two dueling impulses within the Commandant: the first to order people about, and the second to act with all necessary expedience.

“I must find my protocol droid before we leave,” he announced.

“You can get another droid,” Swift said impatiently. “I’m sure the Empire will provide.” 

“This is not a matter of personal amenity. I need to wipe her memory. I would rather be thrown into a New Republic prison than give them access to any of my research.” 

Stalking forward, hands slapping against the batons on his side, Swift revisited some of the violent retrieval strategies he had been formulating on his way to the Commandant’s office. “And I would rather receive my payment,” he hissed, eschewing politeness entirely, “and I will be paid when I bring you to the _Ravager_. No one told me to save your research, or your Academy. If I wanted to, I could drag you back in binders, and toss you at Sloane’s feet.” The tips of his batons crackled with energy as he unsheathed them. 

Hux rounded on him with only disdain glinting in his eyes. “You won’t be paid if you return without my son,” he snapped. “For that you need my cooperation.”

That made Swift halt, his grip on his weapons tightening. It was true. But…

“He is not at the Academy,” Hux added coldly.

“Dumped him with your mistress, then?” Swift snorted with derision when Hux scowled. “Yes, I know about that. Took only a bit of sleuthing to uncover the sorry tale of the Commandant and the kitchen woman. You think I can’t find them myself? A reminder: my job is finding people. And I’m good at my job.”

“Then do it,” the Commandant growled. “Subdue me. Clap binders on my wrists, knock me unconscious. Waste my time, and your own.” Moving faster than Swift would have expected, had he not witnessed the man drawing a blaster with the same speed, Hux grabbed the bounty hunter’s wrist and yanked it up so the electric end of the baton was a knuckle’s width from his own breastbone. “I have no patience for waffling,” he said. “We are doing this my way or your way. Decide now.” 

A hint of a mad grin turned up the corners of Swift’s mouth. He knew when he’d lost, and he supposed it was a rather spectacularly called bluff. That didn’t mean he liked Hux, but it meant something. He flicked the power off on the baton. “Lead the way, sir,” he drawled.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to chat about my Hux family or anything else, hit me up at permian-tropos.tumblr.com


End file.
